Why Philly Matters: Fits Like a Glove

The next day, I visited Cardinal Dougherty High School, which I attended from 1965 to 1968. I was finishing a memoir about growing up in East Falls and West Oak Lane, and needed to do some fact-checking. I hadn’t been back to Dougherty in 40 years, in part because I had much fonder memories of attending St. Joe’s, but mostly because I never felt much emotional attachment to Dougherty in the first place. Those of us who grew up in St. Benedict’s and Immaculate Conception parishes, rougher neighborhoods way out on the periphery of the Dougherty fiefdom, felt it was a school for the snooty kids from Lawndale and Fern Rock. I had strong ties to West Oak Lane and Germantown; Lawndale was as alien to me as Sumatra and Katmandu. This wasn’t an unusual attitude in the City of Philadelphia; it was, in fact, what Philadelphia was all about. You were born in St. Ambrose’s, I was born in St. Ed’s. Never the twain shall meet.

Mike Pendergast, who graduated one year after me, is now the director of alumni relations at Dougherty. He graciously filled me in on who died when and where and how, and who went on to do what. Some of my classmates made it big; others didn’t. A few didn’t make it through their 20s: car crashes, accidents, drugs. Mike gave me an alumni directory, and I paged through it, looking for the name “Joe Alteari.” Joe and I had played in a rock band when we were growing up in West Oak Lane; it was through him that I met Rob, who grew up at Franklin and Rockland. This was technically Olney, but Jews preferred to call it Logan, because Olney was filled with Germans and Logan was filled with Ukrainians, Poles and Jews. I hadn’t seen Joe since 1982, and wanted to get in contact with him to verify some details for my book, about how he had beguiled the other members of the Phase Shift Network into letting me join the band. There was no listing for Joe, but his older sister Joanne was right there in black and white.

I phoned her that afternoon, and we fell into a conversation so relaxed and casual, it seemed as if we had last been chatting at dinner the week before. In truth, I hadn’t seen her since June 1968. We got caught up on the intervening four decades. Like my family, the Altearis had eventually left West Oak Lane and moved to Olney; like my family, they had then moved up to Fox Chase. But Fox Chase would never seem like home in the way that West Oak Lane did, because home is where you spent your childhood. We talked about how much we loved growing up in West Oak Lane, about the seafood house and the old apothecary. I told her that on my visits to Philadelphia I always stopped by our old house on Chelten Avenue, directly across the street from St. Benedict’s. The church, built in the 1950s, seemed unimaginably sleek and classy when I was a teenager, and it still seemed that way now. As for Joe, he was living in Delaware. She gave me his number, and I said that the next time I was in Fox Chase, I would stop by and say hello.